Angry Planet - What Makes 'Oppenheimer' Great and Why It Sucks

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Freelance journalist Kelsey Atherton joins Angry Planet to talk about Oppenheimer. The movie does a good, but not perfect, job with history and tends toward mythmaking. Matthew loved it and Atherton had some issues with it. In this wide-ranging conversation that covers nuclear history, our renewed atomic fears, and the people left out of the story, the two nuclear journalists dissect Hollywood’s latest blockbuster.The People Building AI with 'Existential Risk' Are Really Not Getting 'Oppenheimer'We Are All OppenheimerAtherton’s Wars of the Future Past12 Books and Movies to Check Out After 'Oppenheimer'What ‘Oppenheimer’ doesn’t tell you about atomic bombsAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. By way of introductions here at the beginning, as we experiment with the new softer opening on Angry Planet, I am Matthew Gald. I do various things, advice media for now. I'm joined by Jason Fields. She's the opinion editor at Newsweek and Kelsey Atherton, consummate freelancer. and nuclear expert who lives in New Mexico. And we're going to be talking about the movie Oppenheimer. But first, you've been on the show twice before, Kelsey, and I'm sorry, I have to do this. Both times it's been to talk about UFOs. I think I've decided I'm just going to full-on call them UFOs now. I don't want to call them UAP anymore.

I'm so irritated by the coverage and by the audience reaction to anything that has ever done about UAPs or UFOs. So last time we had you on the show, we got some more upset audience feedback. And they were from subscribers who I dearly love and I'm very pleased with, but I can't stress enough that this I can't like there's not the information that y'all want is does not exist. We don't have it. And I very seriously doubt that the people who are testifying before Congress today, which is the day that we're talking, also have it. So the theme of, one of the themes of Oppenheimer is, I think, you wouldn't want to answer for your whole life.

But, Kelsey, I am going to make you answer for some tweets that you did just before we got on. That's fair. I should be held accountable for my tweets. My baseline take on UFO, UAP News, which informs, how I report is that we too easily dismissed terrestrial explanations ranging from sensor error to human fallibility and I would start there

1,000 times out of 1,000 before looking beyond the stars for answers. The corollary to this is that the prerogative of the military to collect information and keep it secret makes it at this point impossible for some part of the public to be satisfied with the disclosure of a lack of evidence

as meaningful while refusal to disclose becomes proof. How did you feel about that testimony today from the gentleman. I, so I have only seen a 90-second clip, which is about what I can stomach. And I imagine I may go into it more. I certainly will if another their dangles freelance money in front of me. That is my nature.

But for that 90-second clip, a member of the house asked, for evidence, and he said he couldn't offer it, but he could describe the nature of it. And he did that a few times. That clip was specifically about the supposed recovery of biologic compounds in UFOs stored at government sites, and the biological compounds are not human. And he said he would be willing to talk more in a skiff or a, I know, secure list, compartmentalized information forum. Yeah. It's a,

it's a term of art in the security world. Yeah, basically like a secure room. It's the box in which you're allowed to say secret things for, with the understanding that everyone in it is cleared and the secrets won't get out or be overheard.

The box that live in, yes. So it's whatever. There may be a closed-door secret hearing about it, but none of the evidence sounds compelling. Now, the speaker is previously gone forward and made a series of wild statements like, what if, well, the aliens first made contact in the 30s with Italians, which is itself a great premise for a comedy. imagine, if you will, aliens who observed Rome, and then by the time their vessel got there,

it was Mussolini in charge. Great, fun, wonderful fiction. I don't believe for a second that anything he is saying is anything grounded in truth. I would need to see a heap of evidence to convince me that there's evidence behind any of it. Yeah, this is a gentleman that is made.

We're talking about, is it Gorsk? Yep, it is. He has made wild claims and essentially provided no evidence for those claims. And the kind of the waving off is like, well, he worked for X, Y, and Z. And a lot of the stuff is tenuous and unproven. And just, but we, the thing that frustrates

me, and I think I'm going to write about this tomorrow in the Angry Planet newsletter, which can get at angryplanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com is that for 20 years or more, we have lived in a world where the public and our political leadership has largely been incurious about how the military spends its time and keeps its secrets. With exceptions, of course, with notable exceptions, but largely I think that that has been the case. And so we now have a time when politicians and the public are very curious about how the military keeps its secrets. And what they're going to do is they're going to spend that curiosity chasing bullshit. Instead of asking real questions about like, hey, what's going into this overseas contingency budget that we can't see? And like, what are you spending that money on?

And that's so many billions of dollars that are unaccounted for. They're going to all these operations in checks, notes, North Africa. You know, just like, can we ask the questions? We can't, apparently. So I think there's something, and this will, this could be our bridge back to, back to Opanheimer if we wanted to be. But one of the things about classification and about the secrets have been a part of war since there's been the collection of information and the, idea that you don't shout what you see as soon as you observe it. That's ancient. Certainly World War II saw a vast array of secrets. We'll talk about that later, but one of the things

that really happened when we get the proper national security state, which we look to World War II, but really it's 1947. This year I'd like to hammer home when we get the NSA. Their job is to monitor electronic communications beyond the borders of the United States. And that includes stuff coming in so they can figure out who in the U.S. is talking to people abroad. We get, that's when the Air Force is fissioned off of the army. That's when we have a huge amount of this apparatus to be on a permanent war footing because you have to know information and keep it secret. And that's the same year.

We get the first big UFO panic, the flying saucer panic. It's the year of Roswell. We talked about it a lot last time. So one of the things that happens, though, is once you have the vast apparatus of the collection of secrets. you have to operate from a system that, well, the public can't know or it's dangerous for the public to know. And so you build a lack of trust in, and then you have to really hope that the public is comfortable with the military knowing and not telling you, and with the government knowing and not telling you.

And that trust erodes for a host of reasons, because it turns out secrecy is very useful for not just protecting military plans. but it's also a really useful tool for covering up everything from accidents to disasters to war crimes to policy debates about the weapons that are built and used in our name. And so UFOs exist in part just as a side effect of the government could have disclosed things early and it'd be easy to dismiss these things. And now we have it in a weird place where to the extent we've seen evidence, the government would rather believe that the military is right, the sensors are right, and the objects are unknown, then the sensors might be wrong or the pilots might be wrong. Or there might be people with clearances wandering around talking to the house, making stuff up. We are also living in a time when trust in government is near zero. Except on this specific issue and with certain specific people, right? Well, I guess government, I guess people separate the military and the government, right?

I think they do. I think they do. And I think that we have some really weird members of Congress who are happy to talk about some really unusual stuff. The fact that we're having these kinds of hearings. I mean, you know, I hope, and I don't know for a fact, but I hope Louis Gohmert is deeply involved in this because he's the stupidest man in Congress and has asked some wonderful questions over the years. I have a counterfactual on Gohmert, actually. No, you do not. I know you're from Texas.

I'm sorry. I'm sure it's very sensitive subject. He ain't, Gohmert ain't performing for a national audience. He's performing for the, he's performing for his constituency in East Texas, who have avowedly voted him in repeatedly because he gets, because he says crazy stuff about, you know, luxury, uh, luxury space communism, uh,

and gets his clip on MSNBC and they get to hoot. Sorry, East Texans. You do hoot. My parents live there now. I, I know, I know what the hooting is.

Uh, and they get to hoot and say, look at Gohmert. He's up there, giving it to the libs. Uh, fuck him. And they repeatedly sent him back into Congress just to do that.

Uh, and he knows what he's doing. Um, I know people, people that know him. And Gohmert knows what he's doing. Is he a bright man? Yes, because he knows that he's a performer.

So much about Texas politics is about, because it's this massive state with a bunch of different constituencies that is actually tied together with like a, what I will call like a national mythology, which is why they get so upset when you attack that national mythology, which we've talked about on the show before. Yeah. that the people, the Texas politicians like Dan Patrick, like Louis Gomert,

that know how to stand up and, like, play to that audience. And grandstand and be showmen are the ones that survive. And that's, like, why, like, is crooked and weird as, like, Abbott is, who's the governor, the real power and the real center of Texas political powers, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor. But that's like, now we've got to get back to Oppenheimer. So the way we get back to Oppenheimer, right, is that the theatrics of politics and this whole K-Fob of what do you know, what do your constituents know, and what are you allowed to talk about is the, I don't want to say it's the central tension of the movie. The movie has, I think, three pretty distinct acts. But the last third of the movie, but given that it's Nolan, all the plots are pretty much woven in and out.

there's one 20-minute sequence that plays linearly, and that's it, which we'll get to. But I think one of the big things in the movie, one of the things that Nolan clearly found compelling about the story we can talk about, which we agree with that choice in the scripting, is the theatrics of security state and the theatrics of debates that happened behind closed doors, but being decided in public appearances in the red, scare. And I also think that it's about to Oppenheimer as salesman as well as scientist. And I think that's part of the reason why as I was watching it, I just want to get this out of the way at the beginning. I loved the movie. I think you did not. Correct? I was profoundly

disappointed in the movie. I thought it was well shot. I thought it was well acted. I thought most of it was faithful to American Prometheus, the biography of Oppenheimer, which he bases it, but I think fundamentally, I thought the script was underwhelming. And from there, there was no amount of Robert Downey Jr. giving his all or the greatest collection of weird little guys is ever assembled as supporting actors that could have carried it from an acting showcase to a film I would recommend people see to understand Los Alamos. Let's put a pin in that real quick. Back to Oppenheimer as salesman. I was thinking about why, and I wonder if you have an answer to this question.

This was a project that spanned. Several states was kept a very secret, involved some of the brightest minds in America at the time in like thousands of more men and women who came together in one of the biggest like industrial, scientific, military, private partnerships we've ever seen and produced a world-changing weapon. There was one guy that was the head of one lab in Los Alamos who has become for some. reason in the American mythology, like the head of this thing, in the center of it. Why is Oppenheimer the guy that people focus on? So there's a few reasons. I think among them is that Oppenheimer embraced that role. I think he was put forward as such.

I think it was a deliberate choice by the U.S. government to talk about him. meant for him to step into that role afterwards when they could reveal what had happened. How do you explain the science? And you explain the science with the professor who brought theoretical physics to the United States and then used that knowledge to lead a, what is in today's dollars. I think the estimate I saw was $37 billion project. There's estimates out there, but massive. It was a massive secret government undertaking. And so I think it's perfect.

I think part of it was the choice to frame it as a, as the work of scientists, as a technical achievement versus other ways you could have talked about it. I think he's also, I mean, there's, if you're going to make a biopic, I mean, there's, there's a floating image that someone assembled of what the, the MCU style, um, rollout of movies about other physicists. where you'd get like feyman as Ant Man and you give Von Newman and all the other ones and they'd lead up to a Von Braun movie. You can see that this is a collection of people with

deep interest and ability and their own histories that are varying degrees of interesting. But I think he's a individually compelling figure and he had a big tension among the scientists and we see it

sort of covered there is the choice of when do scientists speak as scientists about what they have done? And he is very firmly in the camp that after the bomb has been demonstrated to the world is when science comes forward and talks about it. But it is interesting, right? Los Alamos is the central node of, but it's a weapons theory lab. It's the theory lab and the first iteration. a third of the Manhattan

project's money or so went to Oak Ridge where they did the enrichment of uranium. Oak Ridge I think is mentioned once or twice in the film. I don't I think Hanford is mentioned. That's where they built reactors to refine to refine plutonium.

We know that the plutonium is mentioned. It's one of the two jars being filled with marbles in the visual approximation of it. but I know, I think it's a Oppenheimer is a myth the labs embraced and still

embraced to this day. I was looking around trying to poke around for other stuff on the Los Alamos website and they're just all very happy to talk about their very cool and unproblematic founder. Which is, I just wonder though, hold on, sorry, just one quick thing. Isn't it good to have someone

just simply to blame and or congratulate for the atomic bomb. Isn't it nice to have someone you can put the title of father of the atomic bomb on? This will be the thing that we discuss for the rest of the episode. Yeah, quickly, I think it is, it makes it so that you can tell a story about a series of choices and feel as though there was specific agency over it. we can sort of trace the line from the discovery of vision to the Einstein letter that Fermi wrote to the decision of the special committee on uranium or I forget the exact name of it, but the thing that starts this in motion to Groves trying to figure out how do I turn a bunch of scattered scientists and government resources into a factory for a bomb that has never before. for existed, all the way up to how is that bomb designed, assembled, and tested,

which is really where Oppenheimer's role is in the specific scientific and laboratory management of it. And then you get to the policy questions of like we see the war room scene where Stimson presides over a debate, over a target list. and then we get Truman afterwards saying it was his decision to do it,

though there's some historicity in that, which we can get into. But if you have a scientist to point to and to blame, you can say, well, this is just a discovery that someone was going to make, rather than this was a policy choice that

happened. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're to pause here for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We were on with Kelsey Atherton talking about Oppenheimer. My pitch for why I like this movie and why I think it's brilliant and good, and we'll contribute, and I think we'll be a net good to our understanding of nuclear weapons, is because you and I and everyone else that studies nuclear weapons, maybe not in the past couple years, but certainly before this, have moaned that no one gives a shit, that the American public,

some parts of the American public, and I know that Jeffrey Lewis found this up through some studies, there are large segments of the American public that after the Soviet Union fell thought that all of the nukes had been dismantled. So we have now a big budget, well-acted, mythological piece that, can serve as a starting off point for people. And it's incredibly well made, and I thought very affecting, and serves to begin to stir in people the curiosity about like what happened there. And also like what the moral ramifications are of that.

It's like the, the movie is very interested in, despite like what may be historically accurate, putting Oppenheimer in the role of wrestling with, oh, God, what the fuck did we do? And I think, like, in addition to that, like, that final scene with Einstein is about, like, what did we do and also, what are we going to do to you because of what we did? and like how will this all be distorted? And I think like a good reading of like I think that the movie is very good at being emotionally impactful in a way that makes people without overwhelming them like something like a cold reading of like barefoot gin would do. Makes you feel the beginning of the power and the horror of this thing in a way that I'm in a way that I'm. I would hope would then spur you on to want to learn more.

And I think that that is good for this community and for this thing that we are obsessed with and that we study. What say you? So I will say that I have spent, so I saw it Thursday, Thursday night. I saw it after, so Thursday at the 20th, I saw it after seeing Barbie. We were doing a whole Barbenheimer thing. And I saw it with our friend, Marty Pfeiffer, who is a very, very thoughtful commenter. And his earliest writing in his reaction to the movie is very much that Oppenheimer is a story of the myth. Yes.

It's very much a telling of the myth, which I agree with. The whole crew I saw it with was disappointed, but I've had many, many, many conversations. I've basically not stopped talking or thinking about this movie, which is perhaps a testament to it since, though it's also the nature of my beat. And I'm not, there's a, there's a broad camp that likes it. It sees it as masterful. Certainly Nolan knows how to put something on the screen, and there's very few errors. And I think for most audiences, the fact that Ghost Ranch was used for Los Alamos won't feel weird when they're looking in the background and wondering why. the cliffs are the cliffs they're familiar with um this is this is the specific burden we have as new

mexicans um but um i think um i agree that this will be the new baseline um i think it's it's important to understand that this i was not expecting it to be as much of a blockbuster as it is um that uh is mind blowing um but he made this is now the movie oh go ahead he made a movie that is it's three hours of conversation with with a tense score over it

and then like a 20 minute action set piece in the middle but it is mostly like people talking and close-ups of faces right and it's one of the biggest movies of the year easily

and it's the last I saw it was the best the second best debut of a biopic after American sniper, which is wild to put them in contrast. I certainly think I would hold this a more useful movie for people to see, even if American sniper might be the distillation of what it felt like to have Cold War nationalism, or not Cold War, but War and Terror nationalism running through your brain. Have you seen American sniper? I can't bring myself to do it, man.

I have counterfactual on that, too. I think what you said just now about it being like the disillation of like what Cold War nationalism does to the brain. I think that's true. I think Eastwood knew was a little bit savvier than what audience reaction to that movie was, kind of on both sides of the political aisle. I mean, there's a great, there are scenes where like people call, the American sniper character. I will call him a character and not a real person

in the context of the film out on like, hey, this is a nightmare. We're doing nightmare shit. Why can't you see that? Anyway, setting that aside. So, so I went into Oppenheimer going like, all right, here is why I,

this will be the baseline for how people and people broadly, but more specifically in a personal context, the kind of people who show up in my mentions or send me comments or send me angry emails, we'll think about the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb and the early history of the Cold War.

And what kind of things, what will be different about how, about those messages I get afterwards than before? And I thought, well, it was filmed in New Mexico. It has New Mexico film credits. The Downwinders, the Tularosa Downwinders,

people who and still living people but also many people who can trace their family back to living in the Hernada de Merto or the other areas can point to what happened when fallout came and there was no explanation.

We have, there's one particularly colorful moment you could have put in is the Manhattan Project went and bought up a bunch of cows from ranchers because the cows had been burned on one side from the blast or from the heat and you could see their fur change in the direction where they were standing

when the bomb went off and the Manhattan Project just bought the cows and took them away to study them and didn't sort of tell people what had happened. You could put these things there. I was hoping we would see any of that, but the most we get for human consequence, and this is really,

I have two big feelings about about the movie that left me leaving the theater underwhelmed. And one of them, when we see human consequence, we see it through Oppenheimer having visions of what the atom bomb does to a specific body or to a couple bodies. We see skin. There's a scene where he's giving, and the juxtaposition of him giving

a victory speech and having these visions is compelling. But there's a, so we see like a body that has been totally turned to ash. And we see someone who has the skin being flayed off their body by the blast. And we see people huddling and crying. There's a guy vomiting afterwards, which could be radiation sickness or could just be the fact that some of the scientists threw up afterwards from having to contemplate what, what they had done now that it had been done. That scene works, but the only other time, really, we have him confronting the fact that

the atom bombs killed tens of thousands in seconds is there's a film strip being shown that was recorded by Manhattan Project researchers. They went, they walked through, they bring back the film strip, and we see Oppenheimer watching the film strip with the audio from the film playing and he turns his face away from the film strip. We do not see the film strip. We do not see the scale or the actual harm. We see his imagination of the harm and we see that we know he sees the harm, but the audience does it. The film does give one of the two estimates for the dead. It gives the 110,000 estimate, which is the contemporary ested by the U.S. Army, so that's in there.

But it's hard because I don't know how you make an audience sit through a movie like that, at that length, certainly if you include it. But I think fundamentally it's a disservice to cover nuclear weapons to tell the foundational story of the atomic myth without putting on screen the harm at scale in a meaningful way. I've thought about that moment a lot. actually the specific moment of, I think that juxtaposition where he's giving the victory speech in seeing the,

he's imagining finally what he's made affecting the people he knows instead of like abstract people overseas, right? Is like, I think that's an incredibly powerful moment. And I've meditated quite a bit on the moment where he's, they were watching the film strip and the camera like holds on his face and he looks away.

I would argue that. that we know what it looks like when you make people sit through, maybe not three hours, but movies about the Japanese experience of the war, there's a lot of them. You know, it's weird. I was thinking about this,

like how many of the great ones are animated? And I think maybe it's because it's easier to convey the nightmare of like what literally happens to a body in that hellfire. And I think like Barefoot Jen, Grave of the Fireflies. Is it the wind rises, which is the other Miyazaki from a few years ago, which is about the weapons manufacturer in Japan.

There's a great Khorasawa movie from the 50s about the fear of being bombed. We have a lot of these stories from the Japanese perspective that I think go through all of that. And I think that holding the camera on Oppenheimer's face is like consistent with what the kind of the myth that they are tried that no one is trying to build within the movie itself and there's something to me that's like we don't see it because he looks away does that make sense like we are constantly the audience vehicle with this thing and like it is so horrifying that are the the audience insert character can't

can't look at it. And so we don't see it either. And if this were a case, I would be more sympathetic to like making sure that we saw it if there weren't this extensive 80 years of artwork in both in text like John Hershey's Hiroshima, which I think we talked about before. In text and in the visual medium, there's photographs like all of this stuff is available and we can see it. It has not been suppressed recently. So, and this is one of the things where I spend a lot of my time and a lot of these conversations about it. I think, had I been asked, all right, Kelsey, you get to add 30 seconds into this film, what are you doing? I would have it show the film strip and then pan to him and he turns away. I think you have to show the, I think you have to show the scale and you have to show that it happened not just to buildings, but to bodies. And I'm informed by this. So there is the National Museum of Nuclear Scientists and Nuclear Heritage and Science, something like that. In Albuquerque, it was briefly, it was originally in the Air Force Base here,

where we have 2,000 or so warheads and then underground bunker. Then it was in Albuquerque's old time for a while, and it turns out Albuquerque as a city, was pretty uncomfortable with the fact that our Indian National Labs is super duper involved in nuclear weapons research, so they didn't want that to be what tourists near the city, and so it's now moved to like it's across from a Costco near the entrance to the base. And we all know that the city is breaking bad.

Right. That's much better. That was literally the first thing my Uber driver brought up when I was there a few weeks ago. I was like, you know, this is the Breaking Bad City. I was like, I get it. Thank you. Anyway, sorry.

Yes, yes. I'm so glad they're showing you all about these finest points. But so we have this museum, and in the museum, it opens. It's a good guy. But the path through the museum, as you walk up and you see, here's the discovery of radioactivity. It immediately cuts to, here's a case showing a standard German soldier's toolkit from World War II in the state of Japanese soldiers. Here's the rape of Nanking.

Here are their war crimes. Then it goes into the development of atomic research and there. So it sets you up very clearly with here are the villains who, are, this is designed to be used against and it gets there. And then it walks through and like here is like the Packard car that drove the gadget down and all these things. And here's a casing of fat man and a casing a little boy. And then there are six photographs from Hiroshima on the wall.

And the closest we see to there being anything like this has done to a human is a tricycle, is a melted tricycle. in recent years they added a paper cranes thing hanging over it, which is a weirder juxtaposition than not. And that's, there are other museums. The Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos, if I recall correctly, does a better job of it. But there's things that have done worse in 1990, in the early 90s for a 50th end of World War II exhibit. The Air and Space Museum was going to display the Nola Gay.

And the director said we should put up some captions talking about the human cost. And the ultimate firestorm from that about it was disrespectful to the veterans. It spad in the faces of the people who would have been in the invasion and died was a whole other thing to talk about. Anyway, the Smithsonian director had to step down from saying we need to talk about what the dead does. What about the deaths this weapon caused about the fact that there was a human cost to this weapon? And so that's the perspective I bring in, which is my baseline assumption is when people first encounter, is when people encounter stories about nuclear weapons, the scale is missing and the harm is missing. You can seek these things out. After I saw this weekend, I watched the day after Trinity, which is a brisk 90-minute documentary that has those film strips.

we see Roger Serber, one of the Los Alamos scientists who was in the project and then went to film it. He holds up a piece of wood saying here's where the light spot on this is where the window frame blocked out the blast. And we use that to calculate the altitude at which the bomb detonated. And that's also intercut with like walking through fields of bone. It's grim. But I don't think you can shy away from Grimm if you take seriously the responsibility and this is someone's first introduction to atomic weaponry. I try, I think, and I'm maybe getting, I'm waiting for editors to get mad at me about this.

But in every story, there's a really good Bolton of the atomic piece by Alex Wellerstein. I'm a phenomenal, phenomenal technology historian on the nuclear enterprise. And it's what, how do we count the debt? there are two estimates. There's the 1940s estimate for the U.S. Army. There's the 1970s estimate led by Japan. 110,000, 210,000. That's the dead. That's how we estimate it there, too. It's not a between those. There's casualties beyond that. There's injuries and that. But I try to put that in every single story I write about nuclear weapons of any kind of any scale, because these were the ones used in war. This is what we know that they did.

and the scale of these is so much smaller than the ones we have now, which is a big part of it. And so of the Appanamo movie, and I don't want to just keep monoloking here. But I think that's why not, I get from the perspective reasons why we don't see the dead. I don't, I would not have done it so that an audience has to seek out a second movie to understand the impact of the bomb in a visceral.

way other than how Oppenheimer himself feels about it. Well, since I haven't seen it, just to ask straight out, does it make the bomb look cool? I mean, is that why this is missing? In those, I, you know, honestly, I don't think of the bomb as being particularly cool, you know, or non-destructive. So, I would say it does not. I would say that, like, Kelsey's. shaking his head at me like he thinks it makes it look a little cool. I would definitely think that the reaction from some of the scientists when it goes off is cool.

But like my reaction to the bomb itself, the moment, and maybe this is this can't help but be informed by my own knowledge by having seen those pictures, by knowing what it does to a body. Like even thinking about it now, like in, like seeing it in the theater. like really, really fucked me up. Like it, it is like the, the, the raw power that Nolan is able to capture with sight and sound in that moment, like, really, uh, was very affecting to me. Uh, and like, was affecting several other people I know who've seen the movie. Um, and I would not say that it is, it is cool in the way that like a little boy blowing something up thinks is cool maybe. But with the context of everything else that the movie's packaged around, I would say that in the way people are depicted that want to make bigger bombs, that the movie takes the strong moral stance that this is perhaps bad, what we have done. I'm actually, I'm going to, I'm going to agree.

I think the word I would use is awesome in the sense before, like, hey, free hot dog was awesome. but like in the sense of you feel the power and the awe of what has been built and what has been done and the way everyone is assembled to see it. There was exactly one person who cheered in my theater when it happened. Oh my God. Which. That's, that makes me sad. I, you know. Especially because you're in, like, you're in New Mexico.

We have so many. people whose livelihoods are intimately connected to the development, maintenance, and utilization of the bomb. It is a whole thing. The record is, if I remember

this fact from Jay Coughlin correctly, the Department of Energy is set to spend more in the next year on nukes in New Mexico than the state of New Mexico is expected to spend in New Mexico. I might have the time span on that, but it's a huge, huge part of our economy, and it makes

like Los Alamos, this weird, super rich enclave of physicists whose job is engineering the end of the world. So it's not surprising there would be someone. But I think for the audience in general, but you get this really the most incredible thing he does with it. And again, in the incredible sense of awe and terror, Nolan really takes seriously the flash before the blast, before the light. before sound. And those 90 seconds or so, which is a long time for it, to longer than it happened, but it really, really hits of the people seeing it and then waiting for what comes next. I think his characterization of all the

scientists assembled is fantastic. Feynman and Lawrence watching through a windshield of a car. Teller. Oh my God. Beny Safty does an incredible job of Teller.

A phenomenal performance, but him sitting in a chair with thick, thick zinc sunscreen smeared on his face as he has his strange lovian goggles on.

It's a wonderful moment for it. So I think, here's the thing. I think he shows the bomb as the scientists understood it, which is it worked. It's powerful. Its scale is staggering, but what you have to grasp the scale is a field in a desert and mountains at the distance. I forget, Matt, did you end up going to?

I did. I went to Trulman, which is like, I mean, that's. That is what it is, right? It's a field in the middle of the desert with mountains in the distance. And a bunch of, I always say it wrong, Trinit, Trinitite. Trinitite. Trinitite. Um, funny story.

When we, did I tell you about, when we got there, um, we got to the Trinity site. We were three hours on a bus out there. Downwinders talking to us the entire way, which I think is good context. Mm-hmm. sharing basically the stories of like what had happened to them because of this nuclear test that we were about to wander in. And, you know, we go to one of the cabins, one of the homes, then we go out to the site itself. We go out to the site and the tour guide, she's going through her whole pitch and she's got her box of Trinidad and she's like, you can't take any with you, etc., etc. Please don't lick it.

And I immediately was like, oh, what did Marty do? But it wasn't, I was, I ended up cornering her later and I was like, so who licked the Trinidonite? that you have, Trinitite, that you have to give us a warning. And she said, Air Force Colonel. And I was like, I would have expected a Marine to do that. Not an Air Force colonel. And apparently, like, she was handing out the box,

and he just picked it up and just immediately licked it. It got yelled at. But anyway, setting like, yeah, you go out there. And it is, you, there's an obelisk that's been created from a volcanic flow from one of the nearby mountains, right? that kind of that that that that that uh that denotes like where the bomb actually impacted and then it is just kind of desert in every direction in the mountains of the distance and it's peaceful um and weird and ominous um and they have all of the photographs uh kind of lying along a chain link fence on the

back. And it's, I don't know, it's hard when you're there. Like so much of this stuff is so abstract. And I guess this is an argument for showing people the pictures of the dead. It is, these explosions are so enormous. And the physics involved are so complicated. And the impact is so enormous, both in the way we live and in history, that sometimes it's hard to even know how to feel when you're standing in a place like that.

you know. And I sometimes think one of the reasons that like the later tests put like when you're testing in the Pacific is like we're going to put some Navy ships we don't want was just so you could have something in frame you could see at a distance for scale. Yeah. Because you don't need to test a bomb next to a ship to know you'll sink it. But if you want to record a film proving to Congress you can, sure. And that's the thing. It's a very weird trinity's a weird. these a weird spot. I've been a couple times

as a kid and a couple times I think as an adult. And among the weirder parts of it, right, is because it's this desert, the same kind of hardy scrub grasses and little plants persist. So you don't really get a sense

of devastation in the same way. The only structure that was immediately there was the one they built to destroy it. Or to hold the box. Or to hold the bomb. And so this is a place. I spoke to, this is, this will be a piece coming out later at Source, Source New Mexico. But I spoke, there was a screening of Oppenheimer in Santa Fe with a bunch of nuclear disarmament organizations this Saturday. And so I spoke to Tina Kordova after

she had seen it. She had the, I co-founded the Tulsa Dunwinders. And like one of the suggestions she had for how you put this on screen is you show the people, you show downwinders reacting that because the area was thought to be desolate and it's sparse, but it's not desolate in a real sense. There's one figure, I think, is 15,000 people living within 50 miles. But there were people whose windows were blown out. And I think like we don't have reports of immediate deaths from it. No one was that close, but it was certainly enough where people's lives were changed and their things happened.

There's the famous one of a family that was driving north to Albuquerque early in the morning to take one of their family members to a school in Albuquerque. And she asks if a bright light had gone off. all her family is wondering why would she ask that because she was blind and she was able to, it was enough light, she was able to see it. These are the reports we have. And so there are ways, I think, with a little bit more consideration for the people who experienced it who were not art of the military or part of the labs, you could have told a fuller story. Maybe I still think you should have shown the dead, but even if you show that the bomb was seeing,

and felt in New Mexico in a bigger way, then you not just tell the mythology of Oppenheimer, but you tell the story of the nuke as it was perceived beyond Oppenheimer. I want to bring this back kind of at the end of our conversation

to kind of what we'd started with. A big part of this movie, I would say the bulk of this movie, actually, maybe, but certainly the third act, is about what happens to Oppenheimer after the bombs are dropped and the revocation of his queue clearance.

What do you make of that, both as history and as like an important part of this myth, or is it an important part of this myth? So the third act is really the tale of Oppenheimer being of Oppenheimer being

punished and it's unclear why. We certainly the first third of the movie shows his... He's murdering himself. He's... I think in the narrative of the film, he has... In the narrative of the film, if not necessarily history, he has decided that he has to in some way be punished for this. My evidence for, my textual evidence for that is his wife repeatedly saying,

why are you letting this happen? why won't you fight? And I think like one of the key moments of the film that's earlier that kind of reverberates the whole thing for me is when he, after Gene Tatlock, one of his lovers, one of his lovers, has killed herself and he tells his wife and she's pissed and he's very sad and like kind of basically having an anxiety attack.

She says to him, you don't get to commit the sin and then have everyone feel bad for you. And I think that that is like maybe like one of the most important lines in the entire movie. And so I think like it is like in the text of the movie, it is about him turning himself into a Prometheus that will have his liver pecked out. Because that's what he sees. That's what he thinks. That's what movie Oppenheimer thinks that he deserves.

So I think that is tremendously important to, to movie Oppenheimer. And I think I had not fully appreciated how much Nolan was going to make it a red scare

movie. Tetlock matters not just because she, because Oppenheimer had affairs, he has, he has a few

that all get thrown in his face later, but because she was a communist with whom he had an affair and he had lots

and lots of communist associations. And while the film is very clear that he was not the one who his loyalty was not in doubt and there was a different person who at Las

Alamos who got the secrets out to the Soviets. He still is being punished for his left associations. That's the weapon used against him to murder him in this way. Now, I have to ask just to, if you remember, does he say physicists have now known sin in the film? I think he does. actually. Maybe not that specifically, but some variation of that. I'm pretty sure. So that was one of his big lines. I think it was, it's either him or it's Robbie. I've been listening to American Prometheus also afterwards, so my mind is super loaded with all things Oppenheimer right now. But that's one of the lines is that physicists have now known sin as a that's what the atom bomb is. It's the fundamental sin of physics. And what do you, go from there. And so we have this very drama where he is in the film being

martyred for this. And then we see in bits and pieces that the martyrdom is also happening as a policy debate. It's a response to what Oppenheimer does between 1945 and 1954, which is he becomes the public face of the bomb. And he takes a vocal and increasingly public stance that now that the atom bomb exists, we need to. First, he proposes international arms control. He proposes openness with the Soviet Union to talk about it, to know about it, and to he even proposes we surrender sovereignty of it to an international organization that controls all the uranium and all the bombs, which is an incredible, extremely ideological, left but not communist left vision of how you end the war without going into an armist race.

And his vision change over time, he has a long favor. But his big fight is against the hydrogen bomb, which is Teller proposes before the start, or early in the start of the Manhattan Project, the super. Why don't we make a fusion reaction because that can be so much more powerful? Teller, perhaps the most evil person in the film, I think. Possibly Strauss. You think Strauss is worse than Teller? Well, the thing that...

Just because Strauss is the one with the political power that would achieve the dreams of these nightmare scientists? They're basically ideologically aligned, and we don't really get the sense. We get the sense that Oppenheimer's left views are deviant from the government, but it doesn't particularly... And in my recollection, it doesn't particularly name. these are conservatives who are explicitly doing this as their own ideological project. The closest we get is Groves says it.

Groves says that he has never felt comfortable trusting the Russians and seeing them as their allies and sees it as a temporary war expediency. But Groves is at least honest about it. So we have one scene. There's a scene in the Atomic Energy Commission Advisors. They're at a table. It's great.

It's incredible vase work. Love the vase in this scene in the middle of the table. But they have a map and they're drawing circles on the map and like here's what an atom can do to Moscow and here's what an H-Bomb can do to it. And that's the moment where we see sort of that's the stakes of all of this is not just this is a terrifying weapon that can only be used against cities. But an H-bomb is such that you can really only use it against countries. that

on it, the head of Harvard who is on the AAC I believe describes it as a genocide weapon. I think Oppenheimer also uses that language. I'm not sure if it's in the film or not. It is. You believe they call it a genocide weapon at that meeting. Yeah.

So that's good. I'm glad that's in there. But the content of the policy feels almost secondary to Nolan's narrative to the personality conflict between Strauss and Oppenheimer, and the Oppenheimer getting his clearance revoked is the way Strauss wins that fight.

I would say that's absolutely true. I don't think, like, I mean, that it is, this is very much like a movie about Oppenheimer and his personality, and turning him into a Prometheus figure for the purposes of, like, this narrative. And that, it works for me on that level. I will say,

the stuff that I've thought about that works, better is Nolan's asynchronous timeline builds to, there's a conversation we see very early on at the Princeton Institute,

which is to be distinct from Princeton University, but this, this institute that Oppenheimer is appointed to head and Strauss is there to greet him because he sits on the board of it and this is in 1947

and then, oh, well, there's Einstein out in the pond and Oppenheimer goes and has a conversation with him. and that we return to that, and we especially return to that at the end. It's very well done.

The stakes of that conversation are good. I can very much see the script being put together saying this is a very clever way to tie this together. What Oppenheimer has in that conversation, what Einstein says in that conversation, what Strauss thinks happens in that conversation is a very clever through line. And I imagine for many people it will hit with the, with the impact with Apennimer contemplating

the world he has ushered into being. We kind of see him fully realize it and one of the countryness. I won't begrudge anyone thinking that works for them. For me the fact that it is so much

about the loss of his clearance, his martyrdom in the face of that, and then the comeuppance to Strauss in the third act, means we have a movie about the creation of the bomb and the punishment of the creator of the bomb's creator but we do not have a movie that gets that Oppenheimer

cared deeply after the war about preventing an arm's race and preventing the H-bom that's on there, it's in the text, I don't, I want to say it doesn't address it at all but we don't see the scale of what the bomb does that makes him go this is what must be done to prevent us from living

under nuclear peril all the time that we must confront it we must think beyond the simple logic of our nation states holding each other we do get the line where he says

we are two scorpions locked locked in a fight that if one moves the other dies too and The, they abstracted visually in the scenes that you're talking about. It's kind of interesting because the, there is a visual continuity.

At the beginning of the film, Oppenheimer is a young man. He's watching rain form puddles outside of, is it Oxford? It's Oxford, right? Cambridge. Cambridge. He's in Cambridge. It's outside of Cambridge. He's watching the rain hit these puddles.

When he meets Einstein for the first time, or, which, he meets Einstein at Princeton Institute. Einstein is throwing rocks into a lake, and he's watching the same ripples occur. And that is kind of like one of the visuals that closes out the movie. In the middle, when they're in that meeting, when they're talking about the devastation from the super bombs and they're drawing the circles,

you see Oppenheimer's face, and he is also imagining these ripples over that map. And so, like, it's like you're talking about that destruction is, abstracted for us, the audience, and perhaps for Oppenheimer as well. There is, I wanted to ask if you caught this because I wasn't sure. I saw it in the digital production. I know there were many ways to see it. At the end, did you get sort of the camera static where it looks like when you take a picture of, when you see someone try to take a picture of radiation where you get like little white specks pop up over the thing that looks somewhere

like a film green, but sort of weirder. In that last shot, like the last haunted image of his visage, that Yeah, yeah, yeah, or like, or over the pond in there. I didn't catch that. Okay, so I'm not sure if that was there, or that was just how it was playing. It looked to me like what happens when you hold a, when the camera is brought too close,

like, you see someone filming video of an isotope and it's like, oh, here's the, here are pixels getting burnt out. I mean, he's fairly, no one is pretty meticulous. It wouldn't shock me, but I did not catch that in that moment. I'll look for it the next time I watch it. And so I think... Go ahead. I was just going to ask one more question, which is, why now?

Why are we doing an Oppenheimer movie now? You know, I've moved on. I'm just thinking about climate change 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know? Pick your existential dread in 2023, right? Right. That's mine. So I'm just wondering, you know, do you guys have a sense of like this is the right moment to bring Oppenheimen back and why?

Yes. And my reason is that focusing on one existential dread doesn't make the other existential dreads go away. And we live in a world where the remaining nuclear trees are gone. Nobody's checking each other. America is poised to spend billions modernizing, quote-unquote, its nuclear forces. China is building ICBMs in its deserts, ICBM silos, I should say, in its deserts. Russia is testing, it says, a bunch of new different weapons. North Korea's got a bomb.

And we have a nuclear state in the Middle East with unacknowledged nuclear weapons in a precarious political situation. and you have two major nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, and I guess Israel, who have not signed onto the Nonproliferation Treaty, it's more pressing now than ever, I think. And I think that the war in Ukraine has put it back into people's minds. The other reason I think that now makes sense for one, right? this is an enduring this is an enduring threat.

Nuclear weapons do not go do not go away of their own. There's this sort of notion that oh, well, radioactive things decay, but man, the expected viability of a plutonium core in a U.S. warhead is 100 years

without anything being done with it and we're making more to ensure that we don't have any duds in our arsenal of 5,000 is warheads. But the other thing that really, and this is, I think, why I'm so

hyper-focused on scale of destruction here, I wrote, I spent a lot of May and June writing about pop culture and tactical nuclear weapons. And there's a piece up at the Outwriter Foundation I have about it. And one of the things that comes up is

during the course of this writing, Russia and Belarus announced that Belarus was going to hold some Russian tactical weapons. And tactical is a horrible term for it. It's deeply misleading.

It implies something you can do that's small and put on the battlefield. And there are those, but Davy Crockett's are not what people are really talking about, and those haven't been in service in a long time. Tactical can basically mean warheads of the size

used against Japan. That's 20 kilotons, it's 15 kilotons. You could even see people describe things up to, I think, if you, I think, I've seen descriptions of the B61 bomb, which is the one that we can carry on fighter jets and is the smallest, one of smaller arsenal weapons in the U.S. arsenal. It has a dial yield, so it can go from 3,000, not, I think it's 3,000 tons of TNT to 300 tons of T&T depending on 300 kilet. 300 kilotons to, I don't know. There's a huge range of what this weapons yield can be. That's the smallest one we have.

And so, and those are the weapons that people get duster, there's, oh, well, we could have an escalation ladder. We could have, we need to be able to respond proportionately. If Russia does, we need to respond with a small one there. And I don't think it's, there's going to be, maybe, maybe not Gomer, maybe Gohmert to tie it back. Maybe there's going to be some congressional member of Congress who sees Oppenheimer and doesn't read the briefings and isn't, their aid doesn't bother skimming the Congressional Research Service report or whatever. They have all this information available to them. And they're going to base a decision off the movie they see. And they're not going to grasp that when they're authorizing tactical nuclear weapons, they're off or are supporting funding for them or renewed development or renewed warheads or delivery systems. But they're authorizing. is the same kind of weapon, weapons of the scale, that are the only ones we have seen used in war. And it's worse when we consider that all the other weapons in the U.S. Arsenal are much larger,

and orders of magnitude larger in the case of some of them in Megaton range, which we still have a few. If we do not have the largest bent bombs we've ever built, we have far more accurate missiles in delivery systems. And this is, it's a live question. It's a live question among the Apocalypsees we are facing in this century. Apocalyptic. Apocalyptic.

Nice. I would also say very briefly, Jason, I think we are also living in a time right now where we are looking at the fruits of sciences and being horrified by what they've brought. Not just nukes,

but I also think a lot of like the technology revolution and the internet revolution and the information revolution of the past 20, 30 years, we are coming around to feeling pretty bad about some of what it has brought to us

and it is making us reconsider this kind of like breakneck scientific progress that we rushed forward with after World War II. And it's making us pause and think and I think that's also kind of

one of the themes of the movie is like the culmination of 300 years of physics is you know, hundreds of thousands of people dead, um, in a major city in an instant. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the kind of depressing note that we like to go out on here at Angry Planet. I will say, despite, despite my qualms, um, and the fact that I was deeply disappointed. My recommendation is,

um, if you're writing about this, if you're thinking about this, this movie will become the baseline knowledge for most everyone you, encounter about nuclear issues, so it's worth seeing on that perspective. I would highly, highly, highly recommend pairing it with the day after Trinity. It's a 90-minute documentary available on Criterion. It gets a couple of the details wrong.

It was made in, I think, 1980, so it's missing some of the biographical information, which is fine, but it really captures other scientists reacting to it and also them reflecting on it decades later. You get to see Hans Betta, and you get to see Frank Oppenheimer talk about it with even more hindsight than Oppenheimer ever had. He died in 67. And I think it's a really good companion piece

to sort of start understanding this. There was a sort of baseline, knowledge of nuclear weapons and terror and with the end of the Cold War that has largely been missing. I think, among, certainly among my peers who don't

talk to me about this. When they do, I try to instill as much nuclear dread. I'm a great friend. And I think this is a good way to start thinking more seriously, because these are live questions, because we do stand on the precipice, if not the early stages of a new arms race.

Oh, I think we're full on in it. Kelsey Atherton, thank you so much for coming on Angry Planet and talking to us about this. Where can people find your work? I still exist on Twitter. You can also find me.

X. Please, sir. It's X now. Yeah, I'm calling a national airport and I'm calling it Twitter. You can rename things as much as you Like, I'm sticking with the people on this one. So you can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Substack at Wars of Future Past.

I'm also on Blue Sky. I have a piece that came out during this call at Vulture, where I recommend 12 pieces of pop culture or otherwise to see after you've seen Oppenheimer. Day after Trinity is absolutely on there. But it's a, I'd say it's a fun list, but it's a fun list if you found this fun, which I did. which we hope you do. I'll have a piece coming out in Source, New Mexico soon. I have an Armed Control Wonk double review of Barbenheimer that should be coming out at some point.

You can find me on the internet. It is where I live. Thank you so much, Kelsey. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, some help from Kevin Nodell. If you like the show, please consider subscribing to the substack at Angry Planetpod.com or AngryPlanent.com. substack.com, where you get commercial-free versions of the show and some extra episodes.

We've got another one coming down the pike here pretty shortly. We've got another nuclear conversation that's going to happen early next week. I hope you all can tune in for that. Again, that's at angryplanetpod.com or angryprinnet.com or angrypronet.com. We will be back a little bit sooner than one week from now with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.